Disengagement and Democracy
Walzer, Michael
EDITOR'S PAGE Sometime this summer, if all goes well, the United States will disengage its combat troops from Iraq—and next summer from Afghanistan. In the Dissent/Penn Press book Getting Out, a...
...NGOs of different sorts, trade unions, and liberal and left political parties should be engaged with parallel groups in Iraqi and Afghan civil society...
...There have been so many misjudg-ments and mistakes in both places, leaving aside the initial decisions to go in (which I would judge differently in the two cases...
...Whether we should have been there or not, making government effective at local as well as national levels should have been (but wasn't) our primary objective from day one...
...The political parties that the Nazis suppressed were quickly revived...
...If Nazi Germany could be reconstructed as a liberal democracy, they thought, why not Saddam Hussein's Iraq...
...State-building turns out to be enormously difficult...
...Iraq was and is nothing like that...
...The exiled opposition was democratically committed...
...It doesn't follow that the United States in Iraq or NATO in Afghanistan shouldn't try to promote liberalism and democracy, but something considerably less would be enough to justify a military disengagement...
...MICHAEL WALZER...
...And since the ideological front is crucially important in democracy promotion, even magazines should be engaged...
...nor is Afghanistan...
...Decent and effective" means, first, a non-murderous regime (in contrast to Saddam's and the Taliban's), and, second, a regime capable of delivering basic services to all its citizens: physical security, public health, welfare, and education...
...But that can't be their work only, and we can't be sure they will make it their work, or do it well if they do it at all...
...In the Dissent/Penn Press book Getting Out, a number of our writers look at historical examples of imperial and postwar exits and discuss the moral criteria for a successful disengagement...
...One of these is making a best-possible effort to leave behind a decent and effective state...
...But the Nazis had ruled for only twelve years, and had been preceded by the precarious but genuinely democratic Weimar Republic...
...It is the work required by socialist "internationalism...
...The struggles continue (to paraphrase what we used to say about socialism), and the issues remain complex, as the articles on Vietnamese dissidents and Latin American populists in this issue illustrate...
...Is the effort we are making in Iraq and Afghanistan the best we could possibly make...
...so it must also be the work of democrats around the world...
...So, what would a best possible effort look like now...
...The Bush administration's ideologues who talked of regime change in Iraq were misled by the German example (and by their own hubris...
...Democracy promotion is still a good idea, and after the disengagement, it would be nice if American and European officials befriended Iraqi and Afghan democrats...
...That's what states are for, and we have to do our best to leave behind a state of that sort— investing our resources, deploying our people, with that end in view...
...Debates about the role of the Left in this most precarious of ventures will not end when the last tank leaves Afghanistan...
...The country's population was homogeneous, and religious differences played no political role...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
